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Jezz Day Out - MPAC

Memoir

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A Mother's Story by Rosie Batty with Bryce Corbett

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December 2015, no. 377
Rachel Buchanan reviews 'A Mother's Story' by Rosie Batty with Bryce Corbett

I was halfway through A Mother's Story when my oldest daughter asked how I would review it. 'Will you talk about the writing, mum, or the content?' she said. 'You could bring personal experience into it because you are a mother too. You'll read it differently from me.'

Lily is fourteen. She is rarely interested in the same books as me and she has ne ...

M Train by Patti Smith

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December 2015, no. 377
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'M Train' by Patti Smith

The writer is a conductor, opines the 'vaguely handsome, intensely laconic' cowpoke who speaks to Patti Smith as she lingers at 'the frame of a dream'. His words shape Smith's days. 'It's not so easy writing about nothing,' this companion tells her, and she scratches these words over and over onto a wall in her home with a chunk of red chalk.

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Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the 60s by Richard Goldstein

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November 2015, no. 376
Jon Dale reviews 'Another Little Piece of My Heart' by Richard Goldstein

Richard Goldstein, one of the first rock critics, has always occupied a weird place in the history of music criticism. His memoir could have sat uneasily as an attempt to justify and reconcile his position, but instead, Goldstein taps into a strangely confessional vein, tracing his history from the Bronx to the Ballroom, finding his home at the

Women I've Undressed: A Memoir by Orry-Kelly

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November 2015, no. 376
Desley Deacon reviews 'Women I've Undressed' by Orry-Kelly

Orry George Kelly – the Oscar-winning costume designer professionally known as Orry-Kelly – was one of the many Australians who have made it big in Hollywood. He is lucky enough to have been rediscovered by one of our major filmmakers, Gillian Armstrong. Kelly's name and story are now well known, thanks to Armstrong's recent documentary, and so is the brilliant ...

Eat first, talk later: a memoir of food, family and home by Beth Yahp

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November 2015, no. 376
Hilary McPhee reviews 'Eat First, Talk Later' by Beth Yahp

Beth Yahp's beautifully crafted memoir of her ancestors, her parents, and herself is shaped around journeys criss-crossing the Malay Peninsula where her Siamese-speaking Eurasian mother and her Hakka Chinese father met and married in 1961. A photograph seems to have triggered the project – perhaps the lovely sepia cover shot of her parents on their honeymoon, sitt ...

Island Home: A Landscape Memoir by Tim Winton

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November 2015, no. 376
Brian Matthews reviews 'Island Home' by Tim Winton

Tim Winton's island home seethes and rings, whispers and beckons with sheer life. It tantalises through shreds of memories and phantom histories turned to stone or engraved in ocean-scored rocks and remote caves. Like William Blake's 'green and pleasant land', it is compromised but offers 'a World in a grain of sand / And a Heaven in a wild flower'. His isle, like P ...

Second Half First: A Memoir by Drusilla Modjeska

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November 2015, no. 376
Bernadette Brennan reviews 'Second Half First' by Drusilla Modjeska

Twenty-five years ago, Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy reimagined boldly the possibilities for Australian memoir. Modjeska recounts in her new memoir, Second Half First, how in her inaugural appearance at a writers' festival she was on a panel discussing autobiography with two established British writers, Victoria Glendinning and Andrew Motion. Poppy ...

Something for the Pain: A memoir of the turf by Gerald Murnane

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October 2015, no. 375
Shannon Burns reviews 'Something for the Pain' by Gerald Murnane

Narrators in Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories have occasionally scorned autobiography. Near the beginning of A Million Windows (2014), for example, we find: ‘Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of ficti ...

Everything Is Teeth by Evie Wyld and Joe Sumner

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September 2015, no. 374
Chris Flynn reviews 'Everything Is Teeth' by Evie Wyld and Joe Sumner

The age of apex narcissism has opened the publishing floodgates to myopic and often unnecessary confessionals, personal tales of shame and struggle that, in the past, would more likely have been recounted to a priest or therapist. The memoir genre is at its peak, and the descent may be swift and brutal.

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Lion Attack!: I'm Trying to be honest and I want You to Know That by Oliver Mol

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August 2015, no. 373
Joseph Rubbo reviews 'Lion Attack!' by Oliver Mol

Oliver Mol’s début memoir, Lion Attack!, began as an online series titled ‘34 Memories of Growing Up in Texas’. As he relates in the foreword, he wrote these pieces of ‘sudden memoir’ on consecutive days and then uploaded them straight to Facebook. It was only when the series was completed and collated that Mol thought he might have somethin ...

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